Thursday, October 29, 2009

Unit 5 Bahasa Melayu Lesson -- Bercuti di Kampung

I designed these worksheets because one of the comprehensions in her Grade 1 text book required her to read a paragraph and answer some questions.

The trouble she faced was most of the keywords in the comprehension were aliens. Hence, it was basically beyond impossible for her to even guess the answers.

So, I started off by breaking down the paragraphs into simple sentences and spread them out over like 8 - 10 worksheets. We probably spent like 2 lessons before we moved on to the comprehension in the text book.

It was a slow process but it was a guaranteed learning because when she went through the step by step worksheets, every piece of information was absorbed.

Unlike if I did it the conventional way ie. read through the comprehension and explained the meaning as we read, the child could also answer all the questions correctly no doubt but whatever taught to the child would be like passing traffic - once the lesson's over, everything's out of sight and out of mind!!

These are some of the worksheets I did:

This was the comprehension in the text book:

The purpose of this exercise is to reinforce what they have learned.

For children who do not have good basic of Malay to start off Grade 1 (like my girl...), it is very difficult for them to appreciate what is taught at school.

This step by step method is good to build up their confidence and narrow the gap between what they can understand and what the teacher expects.

Any comprehension in your children's text books, you can always use the same methodology - breakdown the key messages into sections / small sentences and build the understanding from there.